My life in the center of the world -- musings on my family, community (local, global, physical and virtual), people and more. Oh and of course, a few words on tech related start-ups, within the context of living in the ulimate start-up with humble goal of repairing the world. Venture backed by over 3,000 years of history, thought, culture, and angst.
By Jacob Ner-David

March 02, 2010

OK, so it's been some time since I have posted to my blog, but even that admission seems so archaic (in Internet time). These days one has the option of tweeting, Facebook status update, Facebook "note," good old email blast, etc. Of course, newspapers do still exist. And my wife, Rabbi Dr. Haviva Ner-David recently started a column in the Jerusalem Post weekend edition. But her articles also appear on-line. And she also writes a column in an on-line only publication called Zeek.

Can all of these options enter the mainstream? I don't think so. What will need to happen is a form of leveling, with Twitter and similar services acting as notification engines, Facebook as a semi-closed circle of "friends," and blogs staying what they were intended to be: "my" voice out into public domain. Blogs are essentially a diary exposed to the world. Some tend to use the medium for more professional reasons, others more personal, and some (like me) a combination.

In one of the companies I am involved in, AttracTV, we are starting to see this all come together. AttracTV developed a platform for "Vidgets," which are applications that run as overlay on video being streamed. Amongst the first vidgets we released were Twitter and Facebook applications. And we see the different usage patterns, around the same content, playing out in real time. We also operate our own proprietary chat application, which is a very closed community (only people watching that content).

But as we know, 99% of the population reads, listens, and watches. They do not create. Facebook has nudged those statistics a bit, and while FB have not released stats yet, I would guess less than 10% of FB users actually update their status on regular basis. Thus the key in moving forward is how do the 99% process the Tweets, FB status updates, blog postings, news flashes, etc. Jeff Pulver has over 350,000 followers to his tweets. How many read each one? (especially given at the rate that Jeff puts information/thoughts/opinions out there...). What does it mean to have 350,000 followers? I subscribe to Jeff's blog, but I couldn't deal with his never ending tweet stream, turned it off hours after I opened up my twitter account.

If Twitter is smart and wants to continue to be the channel they are, they will need to give the 99% of us the tools to manage the avalanche of information. I assume they (and hundreds of third party developers) are hard at work at it right now.

In the end, we will remain the same human beings we are right now. Most of us are passive, some of us are active. The active ones will seek out the best ways to make their voice heard.

January 10, 2010

Ok, so I was wrong [so far] about Facebook...they have turned it into a sustainable platform and profitable business. Will Twitter succeed as well? Based on random interviews below...doubtful. But as I say, I have been wrong before.

June 08, 2009

I have writing a blog now for almost 2 years. From time to time get
comments, sometimes an email (or even an old fashioned phone call,
usually from Elie Wurtman)
complimenting me on a blog posting. The feedback is nice, reminds me
that I am not only writing for myself (which I am) but also for others.

While I am not the world's greatest fan of Facebook, or its bloated
valuation, it definitely has created a public commons, a place where
people feel free to express their opinions. Perhaps, like Wikipedia, it
should be turned into a massive non-profit. Throw a search box in
there, share the ad revenues with Google et al, will definitely be
enough to cover costs of operation (like the Mozilla browser).

What prompts my thoughts on this? Well, was on a super boring
conference call a few days ago, and was fiddling around with Facebook
and decided to write something in the "status" box. I wrote that I was
waiting for President Obama's speech to start, and that I hoped he
would "say the right thing." That launched a debate (on my rather vague
status update) which currently has more than 19 comments. More than any
blog posting I have written, and the comments are well thought out,
whole paragraphs, not just a few words here and there.

Incredible. As always, proves that people have way too much free time,
but also that a simple to use interface, which will guarantee
"exposure" will be enough for many to write and write. And it is
somewhat unmoderated. As long as you are a "friend" of mine you could
comment to anything I throw up on my facebook page. and yet for the
most part the self moderation works...not too much abuse, language is
kept in check, little outright digital vandalism.

Facebook has developed as a powerful medium, and I am not sure if it is
yet at the peak of its power (we will have to see how its kissing
cousin, Twitter, develops), but it certainly is no closer to developing
a real business than a year ago. And perhaps that's OK, if Marc
Zuckerberg gives up on dreams of billions of dollars, and instead
decides to donate facebook to the people. He is young, I am sure he
will figure something else out to make sure he gets his riches. And/or
he could donate it with the caveat that he gets a $X million a year
salary for 10 years, enough to feel that he has real money, but far
short of Sergei like riches.

If any of you know Marc, pass this thought on to him. From an ego point
of view, he did it. Now he needs to decide where to go from here.
Meanwhile I am thinking up my next creative status update....

November 04, 2008

So Twitter still hasn't figured out a business model, but from my personal experience these last few months they have continued to grow. I, however, question the value of that growth.

You see, I have used Twitter a handful of times, mainly to get the feel for it when it first started. I quickly lost interest, as I did not really feel the need to broadcast my location or thoughts on an instant basis throughout the day (and night...). And for a few minutes "followed" the Twitter output of a few friends (and some folks I thought looked interesting). I stopped following because I felt the information I was receiving was beyond boring, or made me feel like I was eavesdropping.

Then over the past few months I started to receive "________ is following you" notifications from Twitter. Over the past few weeks its at least 1-2 a day. Shows the power of ongoing viral spread. Most of it is of very low value, as shown in my case. People are not choosing to follow me, but rather are signing up for Twitter, and then simply pressing "next, next, next," and automatically Twitter signs them up to follow anyone found in their contacts that has a Twitter account...in other words, they become stalkers without even knowing it. While this is growth of the Twitter "network," it is very low (to zero) value). It is one step away from spam.

On the other hand, had a different experience with Twitter last week, which was high value and quite positive. As you know, I spend less than zero time promoting my blog, but here and there it still gets out. I recently wrote a posting about managing a start-up during these difficult financial market conditions, called Running on Empty, which got picked up by Guy Kawasaki in one of his twitter broadcasts (not even in his blog !). I saw an immediate surge in readership, hundreds of people came to my blog simply because Guy had included reference to it in a "twit" (or is it "tweat?").

Now here I think i start to see the real value of Twitter. Not as a way to know when my long lost cousin is crossing the street, but rather to get up to date suggestions from Gurus as to what I should be looking at. That sounds like something I would even pay for...and I'm a cheap guy!

In the old days there was a thriving newsletter business, where smart people published newsletters, and sold very high-end subscriptions -- because there was recognized value in the content, based on the author.

Twitter is poised to transform from a Spam machine into a nex-gen broadcasting service, but they need to stop with the annoying (and devoid of value) network creation, and go back to the old model, of targeted audience paying to hear what their oracle[s] have to say.

September 14, 2008

For me, anything associated with the Wall Street Journal takes on an air of seriousness, woodcuts instead of photos, distinctive typeface, the whole package commanding authority. Now I know that perception is often far from reality, but the highlight of attending Demo conference last week was a fireside chat (well, without an actual fire) between Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, the producers of D conference, and columnists for the Wall Street Journal. And let me tell you, the conversation was nothing like I expected, especially from Kara Swisher.

Before I get to Kara's substantive comments about my favorite over-valuation in the past ten years, I want to dwell for a moment on how personal Kara got in her comments. From her "bite me Comcast" to her reactions to the "other conference" happening up in the BayArea (TechCrunch50), Kara was not at all the reserved Wall Street Journal reporter/columnist I was expecting (Walt stayed more true to pre-conceived notions).

First, in reaction to TechCrunch, Kara said (and this is in front of entire Demo audience, not sure if it was web-cast):"Getting lectured in journalism ethics by Michael Arrington is like getting parenting tips from Britney Spears."

Kara and Walt then turned to social networks and the grandaddy of them all, Facebook. Again Kara got a little [too] personal, talking about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a "twelve year old with stupid clothing choices."

Of course, she did follow that with some somewhat more serious thoughts/questions on Facebook and other social networks like: How do they make money? How do they grow?

Both of those are the key questions, Kara didn't have any answers. Not sure that Mark does either...

Why do I dwell on all of this so much?

For me, a relative outsider, in from Jerusalem to check in on the pulse of technology entrpreneurship, I was reminded how much of an insider game the tech world remains, even in the always on, twittered to death era we live in. What do I mean by that? Well, why do people physically gather in conferences to begin with? Because being there matters, and in the end personalities drive business.

A lot can be accomplished in the virtual world, where things can get personal as well, but in the end physical interaction can't be beat.

Last week TechCrunch passed 1,000,000 subscribers to its RSS feed, which is quite an accomplishment (consider that the Wall Street Journal subscriber base is only about 2 million). Michael Arrington and friends definitely are a force to be reckoned with -- and they know all too well that physical beats virtual hands down. Which is why Techcrunch hosted a competing [physical] conference to Demo.

What does this mean for Jerusalem Capital and our portfolio companies? That we need to get personal as well, we need to be in direct contact with key industry players on a regular basis, and need to show up in order to be counted.

Oh, and regards to the 12 year old with poor clothing choices, well, you all know what I think about Facebook....definitely not worth what Mark and Microsoft think it is/was, but also not going away anytime soon, unless they run out of money. And with Lehman days away from a fire sale, anything is possible.

September 05, 2008

Pretty soon there will be a global "denial of service," caused by the ever increasing hi5 attacks. I hope that somewhere in hi5 management (and/or board, VCs) there is someone paying attention to the blogs, because public frustration is building. And at some point (if we have not reached it yet) a class action could be filed against hi5, on behalf of the Net public, for harassment and waste of good screen space. Just think of all the milliseconds we waste deleting all those hi5 "friend" requests.

Here is another email from a real friend of mine, in response to my query as to whether he really sent me a hi5 invitation:

Inadvertently. Ignore it. I received one from ______, clicked, and clicked that I did NOT want them to send to my entire elist. They did it anyway. Don't sign up for it.Shabbat shalom, ______

Lets hope that the hi5 attacks end soon, and we can return to our regular spam....

May 07, 2008

I was standing at our local community center Yom Hazikaron (Memorial Day) ceremony last night when I looked around and noticed my friend Aharon Horwitz (for more on him and his projects see here ) there as well, along with many other friends and neighbors, a true local community recognition of a national event. When I got home, and checked my email, found reflections that Aharon had already written and sent out, and far more articulate and personal than anything I would say. So Aharon is my guest blogger for the day:

Dear friends,

On Yom Hazikaron I try to personally honor--and ask those I
know to as well--two soldiers from my unit (Nachal 931, August '99 draft) who
died in service: Dani Cohen and Shani Turgeman.

Standing tonight at the
Baka community memorial ceremony my thoughts were already on Dani when, to my
surprise, a boy from Bnei Akiva read aloud to the community about him. Dani, so
it turns out, was a counselor at the neighborhood chapter. I didn't expect that,
didn't even realize that I was daily walking the neighborhood bereft of Dani,
the same neighborhood he'd invited me home to for Shabbat in the year 2000 (how
I wish I'd taken him up on that invitation). Dani's name joined tens of others,
sons and daughters of the assembled bereaved who sat among the rest of us
mourners. Seeing the families and accompanying friends and community members
reminded me that a soldier in Israel is never alone, accompanied as he or she is
by the hopes and dreams of a country, and by the love and firm faith of a
family. So much is risked on every soldier we send out. So much is lost when
they fall.

I, like each of you, honor those like Dani and Shani who
sacrificed for their friends, fellow soldiers, and for all of Israel, and pray
this Yom Hazikaron for the day when no more soldiers will be added to the lists
of fallen. The mitzva of Yom Hazikaron must be to rededicate ourselves to
personally striving for that future day. As Dani wrote in a letter of
premonition to his parents, "the point of life is to be the part of the puzzle
you were meant to be to the best of your ability....to give rise to future
generations better than yourself either by influencing your children or those
around you. I, it seems, am destined to be one of those who had to make his
difference by impacting those around me." To me that is the undying call to us
from these who have fallen in service: one's life is to be spent--as theirs
was--in pursuit of a better future for those who come after. And in that sense,
both Dani and Shani lived life to the fullest.

Dani died in the November
2002 battle near Ma'arat HaMachpelah in Hebron. Shani, serving in the reserves,
was killed near Lebanon during the attack that lead to the kidnapping of Regev
and Goldwasser. May their memories continue to inspire the
living.

May 04, 2008

If you have not yet heard of Twitter you are part of the blessed 99% of the population of the Western world that are not "early adapters." For professional reasons and general curiosity of the 1% (I consider myself to be a bemused observer of the early adapters) I signed up for Twitter back in January, although Twitter has been around as a public service since October 2006 (see here for more on history).

OK, so what is Twitter? Its is a messaging service limited to 140 characters...wait, all of you semi-Geeks ask, isn't that the same as SMS? Well, yes. And aren't there dozens of companies that allow you to message blast from/to mobile phones, PCs, etc.? Yes. So what is new about Twitter? Well, nothing and everything. Nothing technically new, that's for sure.

So what is/was new about Twitter? Well, they picked a funky name, that's always important (think Yahoo!, Google, Ebay...). And they specifically marketed their service to US semi-geeks (think self-important VCs and well-known bloggers). And timing was right, when [finally] the 1% crowd in the US felt comfortable messaging from their mobile devices. And of course after the first blogging wave, which already prepared us to be interested in complete nonsense(;-)).

One of the "features" that Twitter added (this feature exists in many blogging platforms) is to sign up to receive the tweets of a certain Twitter. Basically, to get their micro-blog feed. The 1% crowd loves this, all zapping messages to one other all day long.

As I said, I signed up, literally to just see what the sign-up process was like, see how it worked. Sent a few twits to test web/sms interfaces. haven't twitted in quite some time. But slowly slowly people have found me on Twitter and have signed up to "follow" me. So far only 18, but half of those people I don't even recognize their names! And there is nothing to follow.

To understand better how Twitter is being used by the 1% crowd, I popped over to Brad Feld's Twitter home page, and see that he has 1,383 people "followers" and that he is "following" 132 people. Very believable, and reasonable, given that Brad is one of the best living VCs, and prolific blogger. Persusing through his "tweets," I recommend he stick to blogging, and stop tweeting, but whatever makes you happy.

And then I looked at super-uber-blogger Robert Scoble's Twitter page, and see that he is sending tweets every few minutes (while awake, and sometimes while sleeping). He claims to be following 21,209, and to have 22,545 followers. Meaning every time he sends a tweet, goes out to 22,545 people. That's a lot of virtual ink. Does this make sense? Could he really be keeping up with 21,209 people? Doubt it, but maybe he has outsourced himself...

Bottom line: with all this tweeting, does Twitter make any money (you knew I was going to ask)????

Answer: a few weeks ago, on their Japanese version, started running some ads. Other than that, nada. no revenues.

The aptly named Peter Kafka wrote the other day on Twitter's current fundraising round, see here (asking the age old question, but this time for Twitter, How Much Is Twitter Worth?):

The bigger question: How do you put a value on Twitter, anyway? The
company has only just started seeing a trickle of revenue, via
advertising on its Japan version. But beyond that there's no money
coming in, and it's not clear what the model will be.

While Twitter itself has great buzz, we hear the majority of the
site's traffic comes from outside the site, via other apps like Twhirl,
mobile access, etc. So traditional online advertising--a difficult
prospect to begin with for a communications service (see the struggles
of various IM, email platforms) may be even harder.

That said, based on Twitter's growth and brand dominance, $75
million post-money seems plausible. There must be a pony in there
somewhere.

I am sorry, Mr. Kafka. A company that has no real technology, a usage base of uber-geeks, and no significant revenue should not be valued at $75 million. It's bad for the business of creating businesses.

April 07, 2008

Excellent posting by Hank Williams today on Silicon Alley Insider, which is one of my favorite sources. See full text of his original post below, and definitely check out the discussion that erupted within minutes on SAI...back and forth brings out the angst that many of us have been dealing with over the past few years.

With the success of Google, who weave billions of dollars of profit from millions of "keywords", convincing the world that a "click" has inherent value, there has been a run on the bank. Literally. Everything is now supposed to be supported by "advertising." But remember, as I have often said, in the end someone needs to buy something. That's how advertising works. Otherwise its a massive ponzi scheme.

Traditional media companies have always had (and will have) advertising as a dominant (and sometimes sole) source of revenues. But advertising was never 100% of the revenues, think of movies, video games, even most daily newspapers. There is a price. It is not free.

And now think of services that are not media companies -- there is no historical justification for free. Salesforce.com, a pioneer of using Web X.0, charges. And many gladly pay. Is Gmail free? For now. I doubt it will last, and if it does will mean a re-shuffling, but not complete revolution.

Advertising has its place, but I for one am tired of very smart entrepreneurs acting like deer in the headlights, who have been brainwashed by VCs with too much money that usage/users are all that's important. We will be facing a capital crunch in the days, months, and years ahead -- those who have developed real revenue generating businesses will survive.

I agree with Hank, that VCs are killing many businesses, but there will be a revival of the dead. Make sure you are prepared!

Free" is Killing Us--Blame The VCs

Hank WilliamsApril 4, 2008 9:20 AM
I believe it should be possible to start a small
business and to have a small number of profitable customers, and to
earn a living. From there, it should be possible to work hard, and to
grow your business into something substantial. Until recently, this was
the American way, and it applied to technology as much as to any other business. But no more.

In
today’s “free” world, in most online business categories, it is
inherently impossible to start a small self-sustaining business and to
grow it. This is because in the digital world, advertising, the only
real revenue stream, cannot support a small digital business. If
businesses were based on the idea that people paid for services then
small companies could succeed at a small scale and grow. But it is very
hard to charge when your competition is free.

The
economic problem with advertising businesses is that advertising
businesses do not work without really significant scale. In the past, a
good product or service could address a niche and succeed without being
a home run. Today, a home run is required because if you do not reach a
massive scale, advertisers are uninterested. And even if advertisers
could be attracted, CPMs are so low that the revenue would be
inconsequential. Small Internet businesses don’t work.

So how did we get here? In a word, VC.

Venture
capital has totally distorted the market. VCs are investing billions of
dollars in companies with instructions to get big fast and to worry
about advertising revenue later. As a result the competition is for
users and not for paying customers.

Unfortunately, to fix this, many more companies need to die.

With
less “free” floating around, a more regular supply and demand dynamic
can take hold, customers will have to pay for the things that are
important to them and non-quantized growth dynamics can return. In the
meantime, why should consumers pay for products and services that VCs and their pension fund investors are willing to give away for free?

The
good news is at some point VCs will indeed realize how dumb all of this
is and stop giving away everything of value on the Internet. This will
all stop when the average VC can’t get any of his/her companies to scale because there is just too much VC sponsored free stuff out there. Then and only then will this crazy eyeballs business model redux finally be put to bed.

February 14, 2008

.When I started my "career" as an entrepreneur, I knew that two things would guide me, luck and determination. While it is difficult to control the former, it tends to happen more when you actually work at it, i.e. the determined part. Reading the posting below, many budding entrepreneurs will think wow, it looks so easy, Loic "just" talked to all these famous [and rich] people in the tech world and they all decided to invest...

What he leaves out is the countless hours (over the course of many years) he has spent building his network, and his absolute determination to be at the upper levels of the "conversation." Loic recently started Seesmic, and without going to all those dreaded VC meetings, he raised a nice sized round from a group of "stars" of the tech world.

A few comments on Loic's strategy:

1. He raised what he needed, not some crazy amount.

2. Pay attention to the "pre money" valuation..high for a concept, but not high considering who Loic already was, and how much $$ he was trying to pull in. All in all, about 50% dilution to him and other staff/founders.

3. Investors are all strategic in some way. Whether they actually offer any advice worth anything, or simply are nice window stressing, all the investors add something to the mix.

4. Loic lives and breathes the world he is trying to monetize through Seesmic. He is not approaching this as an MBA "just" looking to score a buck, he lives this stuff (much more than I do, which is why I am not trying to start a Seesmic like company myself these days, as a "founder" or CEO).

5. Seesmic is a big idea, and is intended to scale that way quite quickly.

6. And back to the investors, notice that the forum for many of the conversations were conferences--Seesmic is about the IP enabled "virtual" conversation, but the in person relationship building is still crucial. Going to conferences means travel, means showing up, physically as well as virtually.

As a somewhat related note, I am writing this blog posting from an airport lounge in Prague, on my way back from Barcelona (more on that in separate posting). I was in Barcelona to attend 3GSM/Mobile World Congress. Or more accurately, to meet a lot of people who were also there. I shudder to think how much was spent on that conference by companies large and small for all kinds of impressive and not so impressive booths (some bigger than my house, I kids you not), when for most of us the important element was the human one-on-one, the conversation. Just think, a massive gathering of people to celebrate remote communications...

Anyway, back to Loic and the story of the funding of Seesmic. Enjoy. See you at the next conference!

Traditional media send messages, blogs start conversations

February 14, 2008

How I started Seesmic and raised $6 million

I closed the initial funding of Seesmic in September 2007. The main investment came from Atomico's Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (they invested $5.5 million on the $6 million). Talking to bloggers all the time, I have not been very good at keeping the secret as Om Malik was the first to talk about it on October 8, 2007. On November 28, Liz Gannes got almost the entire list of investors right. We have never really hidden the funding as a partial investor list was even on our company backgrounder at the last Demo conference (by the way see our DEMO video if you want to learn about Seesmic in 6 minutes). So the only real news today is the full list of investors.

We should have made it "officially" public for a while but I did not want to do it until all the paperwork was done and signed. That happened last week. Getting 14 investors on board – most of whom are individuals and not through funds - takes time.

Niklas Zennstrom and I have been friends for years and we have been wanting to launch a project together for a while. We both know that the media that has not really changed since the growth of the Internet is TV. Most of our friends do not watch TV anymore or watch it only with a laptop on their knees. TV will totally change in the future, we all know that. While Niklas and Janus are focusing on the high end video content with Joost, I have always been fascinated by the conversations.

I explained to Niklas that for me, the quality of conversations that I have enjoyed on blogs and social software since 2003 had to happen in video and that simply isn't happening yet. I said I wanted to make this happen and make it my next company and Niklas immediately said he was interested in funding it, as a real partner, as a cofounder, not just as an investor. He quickly introduced me to his long time partner Janus Friis and we immediately got on very well and started to talk how we should make it happen. Mattias Ljungman who works at Atomico with them quickly worked with me on the terms and the deal happened at an unusual pace for a funding this size. Niklas, Janus and Mattias are just the best investors to deal with. They think as entrepreneurs and behave like entrepreneurs. The trust they have given me is unique and I know exactly what it means. Niklas, Janus and Mattias spend an incredible amount of time with us, we were just a full day in London with them, see what they say about Seesmic.

What is the most important for me is how Niklas and Janus reached a massive adoption for Skype without any marketing ("in fact marketing sucks" - as Janus often says), how they turned it into a global product (Niklas and Janus are pushing us to support tens of languages on Seesmic since launch which is what we are working on) and also obviously how to scale, to name a few things.

I started thinking about launching the company. It was back in May and I of course remembered the several startups I launched before Seesmic. What I really wanted with Seesmic, is a global conversation, involving people from as many countries as possible. What my previous companies taught me is that it is very difficult to build a global company in Paris. Just because the center of the Internet is Silicon Valley and will remain, because if you are in Paris you tend to focus on France or Europe naturally. There are exceptions like the dating site Meetic who managed to become #1 in Europe and reach a size that can compete with Match.com, but it is rare (disclosure, I am a board member at Meetic). During the same dinner with Niklas, I decided with my wife Geraldine to move to San Francisco with our three kids to give Seesmic the highest possible chances of becoming a global conversation from day 1.

In two months, we changed our life, our house, the kids' school, our main language switched to english (keeping our accent, though !), got our 5-year long investors visa in the US. I changed phones and computers, leaving my ten-year old business network and friends in Europe.

In September 2007, I felt like I was graduating from business school again and starting from scratch here. Fortunately it was not totally the case. I spoke twice in a row about entrepreneurship at Google Zeitgeist Europe then Google invited me to Zeigeist in the US and that is how I met Steve Case. Conferences often help creating a network very fast and this is why I go to so many. I did not really need to raise anymore money, I could have just settled for the $5.5 million, but I really wanted to have entrepreneurs and friends help me launch Seesmic. I started calling my friends and I won't name them all here of course (please do not be offended if you helped me and I did not quote you here, I did not mean to be comprehensive). Jeff Clavier, Freddy Mini and Scott Rafer helped a lot in setting up everything even before I got my visa.

If you asked me to name only one difference between Europe and the US it would be the positive attitude that floats constantly around here. It is the "how can I help" by default. Trust is by default. You can probably lose it fast but you have it much faster than in Europe where the attitude is more suspicious, more negative. Each time I launched something in Europe I started by getting the criticism and listening people who would explain me why I would fail. Here I have troubles counting how many people offer their help. I spent two hours with Mark Zuckerberg in Davos this year, I enjoyed of course every minute and Mark repeated three times "how can I help you". It is still so unusual for me that the only thing I had to answer was "I do not know yet, but thank you, and let me know how I can help you too". That was exactly the attitude of Mark Pincus. Mark immediately made time for me in his schedule last summer and helped me. Seesmic's office is actually located at his building at 365 Vermont St and I usually get a piece of advice when I bump into him in a corridor as well as English accent lessons.

Back to Michael Arrington. Michael was the first to see Seesmic and was also the first to become so excited about it. Michael sees hundreds of startups a week so coming from him it was a important for me of course. It was the first validation of the video conversation possibly being a big opportunity for me. Michael asked me if he could invest even though it would create issues about investing and writing at the same time, even though disclosures are always in his posts. We would for example have made it to the Crunchies but got kicked out because Michael invested and I said I would still prefer Michael's advice.

Reid Hoffman has been a long time friend, I was fortunate enough that Reid let me invest at the very first round in LinkedIn and Reid was willing to invest in my next venture without even asking what it was. Same story with my buddy and one of Europe's best entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky who told me for years he would be very offended if I did not let him invest in my next startup so here they are both friends and investors in Seesmic. I remember so well when Reid shared with me the LinkedIn slides deck he used to raise his first round, with the entire strategy. I have always been such a fan of Reid. Reid explained that there was no point in getting any revenue in LinkedIn before there is a very large community using it every day. And that is exactly how he did it. I do not think LinkedIn has charged anything before they reached like 3 to 5 million members. Now LinkedIn will generate around $80million in revenues in 2008 (disclosure, I invested in LinkedIn's first round). Seesmic will I hope be as successful but in any case follow the same launch, focusing entirely on its community for now.

Ted Wang, our lawyer, introduced by Jeff Clavier played an amazing role in closing the Series A and I recommend him to any entrepreneur. Actually you will be lucky if you can get Ted's time because he is the lawyer of so many great startups that it's more about being lucky enough to have him as lawyer than the opposite. Ted introduced me to Ariel Poler who in turn decided to invest around a coffee (and help!).

Of course Robert Scoble gave me precious advice (after he also broke the news on launching Seesmic as a rumour) on how to launch and I spent time with him, Robert also participated in the very early conversations at Seesmic. Robert gave me amazing feedback and also introduced me to countless great people. Robert liked the way we shared the idea of Seesmic on a daily basis on loic.tv and gathered feedback from bloggers the very first day. Robert pushed me to continue in this direction, Shel Israel liked the approach too.

One of the first person I called and became friends with is Dave Winer, that I had been reading since I launched my own blog in 2003 and talked to him about Seesmic, how he thought I should launch, how he saw the future of TV. Dave first asked me if he could invest and I immediately accepted of course and then decided he should not invest in company stock whatsoever with the stock market crash. And it's fine, it's not about money, it is about friendship and advice. Jeff Clavier wanted to increase his investment allocation in Seesmic in any way he could so he took Dave's allocation in a second when I told him it was there. Dave, I will still ask you what you think about what we are doing anyway !

I have watched how Steve Garfield and Jeff Pulver have been creative with videoblogging and online video in general for a while and learnt a lot from them. I was very happy when they asked if they could invest too, it was another validation that building a conversation platform for videos makes sense. Dan Gillmor's book, "We the Media" inspired me a lot in the way media is evolving and of course in creating Seesmic. Dan helps on a daily basis, he currently says we should ad Creative Commons support in Seesmic "for yesterday" and that is what we are doing.

Having friends as investors if is a very difficult exercise. It is in principle the best of course because trust is here by default but there is an additional responsibility in taking their money, especially if you fail. It is very risky and all my investors know that. I discussed it with them and want to stay friends with them whatever happens. I have personally invested in about 15 startups, many with friends and lost my money in many so I know what I am talking about and I would hate that investing in Seesmic would change anything in our friendship. In fact I could have not taken their money at all and just built Seesmic with Atomico. It is an additional responsability on my shoulders to take friends money but their advise is so valuable that I wanted to do it.

There are many other people who asked me to also invest in Seesmic. Unfortunately even though we announced the funding today only, it was actually closed for months (most of it in September 07), I just did not want to announce it before all the paperwork was done.

I thought that sharing how Seesmic got funded was important, just like sharing and being honest are the most important parts of both the Seesmic community and the product. We are building Seesmic since day 1 based on the community feedback. We have now a few thousand members of Seesmic around the World who post more than a thousand video a day in average and our active members love it. That is what matters. The people and the product. The funding is "just" the fuel.

Next steps: add the key features which are missing and launch very soon in public. You can follow daily how we build it, join Seesmic and give us your feedback. We will listen to it as much as we can.